Kelly Peters

Kelly Peters is a principal researcher with experience in public health, aging, and program and policy evaluation. Her background is in neuroscience with a focus on cognitive health and wellbeing. She is specifically interested in applying a public health approach to investigating life course models of social, economic, and health outcomes. Her work focuses on investigating how the communities where we live, learn, and work affect our health, wealth, and quality of life.

Dr. Peters serves as the director of Project Talent, a longitudinal study of health and aging that explores relationships between early life educational, socio-economic, and community factors and later life health outcomes in a nationally representative sample of older adults. This body of work aims to inform policymakers, practitioners, and the public about systems, practices, and programs that help or hurt health and aging trends across the lifespan. Project Talent is supported by the National Institutes on Aging and is a partner with NIA’s LINKAGE program—an initiative that aims to expand access to longitudinal cohort-linked data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Project Talent also maintains a mortality registry, linking decedents to death record from the National Death Index.

Prior to joining AIR, Dr. Peters spent over five years at the University of Southern California investigating cognitive trajectories in longitudinal cohort-based samples, including the Health and Retirement Study and Project Talent. She collaborated on projects designing cognitive assessments, investigating interventions for cognitive function and memory, and developing risk models for cognitive decline. Dr. Peters has extensive experience in survey design and methodology, mixed-methods research, machine learning, quantitative and geospatial analyses, data linking methods, and knowledge translation.